Simple Solutions to Big Problems

newly wed housewife, the--a fitting trope for the insecure writer; an attitude in which the writer is overly concerned at the paucity of motivational and physical detail for dramatic action.

Think of the newly wed preparing her first meal for company, then try to superimpose the image on the vision of a writer wondering if the intent and details of a story are clear enough in definition. Likely result: a control-freak attitude toward description. The exact moment an activity or intent begins. A Vogue Magazine description of what the characters are wearing. A laundry list of adjectives and adverbs. Perhaps even an instance or two or six of authorial intrusion.

None of these tactics are fatal; F. Scott Fitzgerald employs them with great regularity (Tender Is the Night and The Great Gatsby), the difference being he gives them a dramatic context that has meaning beyond mere description. These tactics give a better sense of the world into which Fitzgerald has invited us to eavesdrop. Look also at the way his dialogue and narrative work, moving you at a comfortable pace from action to action, weighing each scene down with the tang of such emotions as apprehension, suspicion, jealousy, despair, need.

There is no problem with over-describing each action between characters, each setting, each nuance of each exchange of dialogue. This approach helps articulate the inevitability and authenticity of a story. The problem comes with allowing the prompts and attributions to remain when there is sufficient activity and attitude to reflect the drama that is under way.

Hint: cast your narrative and scenes toward the goal of an emotional presence, using verbs chosen for their personality, hinting at implied meanings, picking adverbs with great deliberation, avoiding the temptation to double up on adjectives, eschewing simile and metaphor that distract from the work at hand rather than illustrate it.

Chiropractic for MSS

manipulation--an arrangement of dramatic elements to produce an emotional effect in a story; distortion or exaggeration of narrative events; the deliberate bending of perspective and/or time in a story; use of implication and subtlety to engage readers; use of a red herring to alert or divert readers' suspicions.

Writers are the literary equivalent of chiropractors, adjusting, kneading, articulating; they are looking for a design pattern to provide the best posture for a story. A basic approach to such adjusting is to rearrange the time sequence. Mystery writer and teacher Leonard Tourney is an advocate of "a slice of the crime," in which he advocates beginning a narrative with a crime being planned or executed by individuals we will meet later on in the text. James Joyce manipulated temporally in his Finnegan's Wake, beginning the huge, complexity of a novel with the last half of the opening sentence, then, hundreds of pages later, ending with the first half of the sentence. Tim Gautreau's The Missing, narratively acute and suspenseful from the opening line, actually manipulates dramatic convention in the sense of providing a double hit of backstory before the main issue is introduced.

In addition to time manipulation, the writer may perform narrative chiropractic with point of view, choosing first-, second- third-, omniscient, and multiple points of view, and in some cases venture into authorial intrusion to make commentary on the characters and their doings. This last approach is amply demonstrated in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, and William M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair.

Characters, their motives and activities, may be manipulated to the extent of influencing the way other characters and readers will respond to them, and indeed, motives may be manipulated to provoke reader sympathy or antipathy.

Manipulation works best when it does not call attention to itself but seems the most natural presentation. Such control is exemplified in the entire presentation of Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières.

The unthinkable

unthinkable come to pass, the--a condition in story in which the worst-case-scenario in the mind of a character is played out; a crucial point in a story where the writer discovers the true site of mischief and energy; the meeting point where the worst fears of the writer and one or more characters meet--and circumstances up the ante.

It is more than a drug deal gone sour (No Country for Old Men) or the sudden resignation of one of the team of bank robbers (Dog Day Afternoon) or the protagonist of Vanity Fair thinking she had married her way into a modicum of respectability. Llewellyn Moss, while out hunting, chances upon the money in No Country, where things become even more unthinkably inevitable when Anton Chigurh enters the story. The two remaining bank robbers in Dog Day become enmeshed in a stand-off with the police, which was more or less expected. The unthinkable element was the revelation of why the bank was robbed in the first place. Thinking she has achieved some measure of respectability and security in her marriage to the equivalent of a low-echelon civil servant, Becky Sharp is given the following proposal: "Come back and be my wife," Sir Pitt pleads. "Birth be hanged. You're as good a lady as ever I see....I'm an old man but a good'n. I'm good for twenty years. I'll make you happy, zee if I don't. You shall do what you like; spend what you like; and 'av it all your own way. I'll make you a zettlement. I'll do everything reg'lar.." At which point "the old man fell down on his knees and leered at her like a satyr."

For an opportunist such as Becky Sharp, how is this the unthinkable come to pass? "Rebecca started back, a picture of consternation. In the course of this history, we have never seen her lose her presence of mind; but she did now." Author Thackeray reminds us how the tears now forming in her eyes were some of the most genuine she ever wept. "'Oh, Sir Pitt!' she said. 'Oh, sir-I-I'm married already."

You would not want to be around at dinner time, when her husband came home, with a sporty kiss and a "Hey, Babycakes, what's for dinner?"

Invention begins in story after the unthinkable has come.

Design for Living

design--a dramatic plan or structure; a deliberate manipulation of dramatic elements with the intent of producing a story; a plot or story arc intended to generate a lasting and memorable effect on the reader.

Design is, in this sense, a noun; it may also be used as a verb in which case it becomes the act of producing a plot line or arrangement of significant dramatic elements that lead to a satisfying conclusion. Plot-driven stories are those in which the design may become predictable, even though the emotional effects such as suspense, tension, horror, anticipation, dread, longing, etc may vary. The better of the plot-driven stories, say those of Harlan Coben or Lee Child, implicitly offer a design of sufficient complexity and issues at stake to lure the reader's attention away from the design while producing one or more of the previously listed emotions. In many ways, such stories are the equivalent of Navajo rugs, intricate, colorfully patterned, pleasing to experience. Character-driven stories are designed to provide emotional responses as well as moral, intellectual, and aesthetic challenges. Richard Powers's The Echo Maker, while superbly plotted, brings characters on stage with issues that actually call their very sense of self into question, luring the reader well past the notion of mere formula or suspense and into self-examination that could produce uncomfortable feelings.

A conventional approach for producing both types of pattern, the more geometrically structured as well as the more open-ended design begins with confronting a single character with a choice of behavior or the need to make some choice within a narrow time frame. On a more plot-oriented design, a character may be given a choice between serving out a long prison term or accepting a life-threatening assignment as a ticket to forgiveness for the crime that landed the character in prison. As well, a character may be confronted head-on with the need to chose allegiance between two feuding factions. One possible approach for beginning a character-driven story is to present the lead character with the need to find out some highly relevant information from his own past or from the past of family, a quest that will lead to the discovery of some unspeakable information. Jay Gatz, later to become Jay Gatsby, began a quest to find his former love, Daisy Buchannan, a quest that brought Gatsby into the midst of a complex pattern or love, betrayal, and social collision.

Particularly in a longer short story, a novella, or a novel, changing points of view in rendering the narrative will have a measurable effect on the dramatic design.

A Call to Action

actioning--an interpretive concept for actors, also useful for providing writers with structural insights; a technique for establishing authentic spontaneity in a character's response to a stimulus, whether from another character, a dramatic condition, or an inanimate object.

Actioning implies finding an action for a particular event in a story. This means translating agenda or goal or perhaps fear or revulsion at every opportunity, resorting to mood as a secondary tool. Once this concept is understood by the writer to the point where it becomes muscle memory, the characters will emerge from a story with greater clarity and purpose. The concept involves knowing in addition to who the character is, what that character wants, what that character is willing to do or not do to attain the goal, and how the character feels about all the other characters in the story.

Hint: For writers, dialogue is also part of actioning.

This last attitude--how characters feel about each other-- is of particular importance when the character speaks to another. Does that character admire, distrust, resent, possibly even hate the other character? And what are the social boundaries surrounding their relationship. Suppose Mary can't stand her mother-in-law? How would she, in a family gathering, inquire if her mother-in-law wanted tea? And suppose the mother-in-law thinks her son could/should have done better in his choice of a wife. How would she respond? "What ever led you to think I drank tea?" Nice, maybe. What about, "This time, remember the lemon." Or, "I'll get it, myself."

Dialogue is not conversation, it is an exchange of dramatic action. A simple line of dialog such as "I'm not hungry" may be read in a number of contexts. Your character should not say "I'm not hungry" (a perfectly plausible thing to say under many circumstances) unless, being said, it hovers between the speaker and the hearer...and the reader with a meaning that extends well beyond,"I don't require food." For instance, suppose the speaker of that "I'm not hungry" line is met with the response, "But I went to great effort to make this for you." Ah, now the light is beginning to dawn.

Added hint: Think verbs at your characters. He wants. She lusts. He envies. She detests.

The writer has the advantage over the actor of being able to use mood in narrative, but to action-ize narrative, imagine the character thinking thoughts at as well as to a particular character or group. I should tell them all, she thought, to take their offer of a vice-presidency and shove it. Thinking that, what does she do next? That's actioning. That's also story.

In much of today's modern theatrical productions, the director and cast meet early in rehearsal to action the script, creating the bonding chemistry among the cast that will inform their interpretations of the lines before them, and making it easier for the director to block out each scene, defining where each character should be. Even for writers who like to proceed with no game plan, detailing the feelings for each character to all the others is a floatation jacked for a sea of chaos.

Design

design--a structural plan for a story; a pattern of dramatic events; an attempt to determine order and significance to a set of motives and agendas; a unifying plan of behavior and response among characters in a story.

However episodic, picaresque, generational, or other loosely structured narratives, story is informed by design. Reading a given story is analogous to opening a surprise package, attempting to guess from the wrapping what the contents are. True enough, many stories are begun with nothing more than a concept or incident which the writer follows just as the opener of the surprise packages tugs at the wrapping, sifts through the insulating material, then withdraws the prize. Through revision and rewriting, the writer begins to see the potential for design, then begins to grasp how the design leads to discovery, first the writer's and then the reader's.

F. Scott Fitzgerald did not see the final design for The Great Gatsby until the work had been set in type, then presented to him for proofing. Somewhere in the process of finding typos and making the AAs (author alterations) so typical of the writing personality and so abhorrent to the publisher personality, Fitzgerald was seized with the notion of elevating Mr. Nick Carraway to the position of principal narrator, thereby giving Fitzgerald the needed leeway to dramatize the closeness he felt with Gatsby and at the same time provide the nuanced perspective of what Gatsby's rise and fall meant on an even more epic scale.

The antic satirical vision of Christopher Moore has on many occasions begun with a what-if concept, in which Moore invents a character he plunks into a well-known cultural event. His design moves like a glob of ketchup dripping from a tightly packed hamburger onto a clean white shirt, spreading, radiating outward. In Fool, he begins with the ensemble cast of King Lear, introduces a character of his own devising, and sets forth to design with and around the consequences.

Arguably outstanding amid a steady output of stunningly different novels, Joseph Wambaugh's The Secrets of Harry Bright begins with the after effects of an airline tragedy, presented with the intriguing and authenticity-on-steroids discovery that triggers a maze of events leading to the satisfying discovery.

"No River Wide," the first story in Robert Boswell's collection, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, is a chronicle of the friendship between two women, but only a writer of Boswell's expansive vision and technique could have designed such a complex design. Reading the story, we cannot help ratifying Boswell's choice of design as being the most effective, just as Fitzgerald's choice of Nick Carraway to narrate Gatsby was the most effective.

Hint: The ultimate design for a novel or short story is often discovered in the revision process, one small part of which is the question the writer must answer: Is this story told in the most effective way?

chaos

chaos--a dramatic condition in which there is no apparent order; a character behaving without a plan or design; a multifarious state of being in which there is no seeming thread that connects individuals or events.

Chaos is the world without story, its purpose random and unstructured. The writer enters the landscape of chaos, imposes a structure or plan, then steps back to watch the characters as they respond to attempts at design. Chaos is also the world without specific individuals being assigned starring roles; as it continues to unfold, the condition of chaos levels the playing field of agenda so that all agendas are of equal importance. When beginning a story, the writer chooses a landscape, which may be pure invention or fantasy or extrapolated speculative fiction but which nevertheless becomes a tangible place for the reader. The writer then adds characters, whose goals help define their prominence and focus.

Story, plot, design--they are all a purposeful rearranging of furniture, the feng shui equivalent of drama, allowing some procession or orbit of event, the totality of which eases the passage of energy from the beginning point to the resolution. Chaos appears at first to be all the distractions a character or group of characters may face, but as the reader grows interested in the characters, chaos morphs into "things that could go wrong," which is a sort of reverse feng shui, a negative energy that arrives in unanticipated increments.

Chaos is a series of laundry list events, awaiting the writer's hand to organize them in some form.